Britain Was Never Supposed to Get the 797-HP Hellcat Redeye — One Dealer Brought It Over Anyway

The Dodge Challenger SRT Hellcat Redeye packs a supercharged 797 horsepower and a low-11-second quarter mile — numbers that make little sense on roads built for cars a third that size. One UK dealer imports the beast anyway, left-hand drive and all. Auto Trader’s Rory Reid finds out if daily-driving America’s last great muscle car actually works across the pond.

Dodge never built a right-hand-drive Hellcat Redeye, and Chrysler certainly never intended one to end up threading a British roundabout. Yet here it is: a genuine Redeye, the 797-horsepower, supercharged monster version of the Challenger, sitting on a UK dealer’s lot in its native left-hand-drive form, daring anyone brave enough to daily-drive it. Auto Trader’s Rory Reid took that dare, wedging America’s last great analog muscle car onto roads it was never engineered to survive. What comes out of that experiment is part comedy, part genuine fear, and part real appreciation for a car that has no business existing outside Michigan drag strips and Florida interstates. Watching a supercharged HEMI try to navigate a roundabout from the wrong seat is exactly the kind of chaos worth a few minutes of your time.

Reid’s review, filmed with help from AMS Dodge — a UK specialist that imports and sells left-hand-drive American muscle to buyers who would rather not wait for a factory that stopped building them — treats the Redeye less like a routine car review and more like a survival test. He walks the exterior, fires up that supercharger whine that sounds like a jet spooling on a runway, and spends real time asking the question British buyers actually care about: can this thing survive a supermarket car park, let alone a motorway commute, when the steering wheel is on the wrong side and the car is nearly as wide as the lane itself?

The answer, unsurprisingly, involves a lot of nervous laughter. Reid pokes at the practical realities of Hellcat ownership abroad — fuel economy that would make a Range Rover blush, tires that cost a small fortune to replace, and the sheer physical presence of a car built for eight-lane American highways trying to squeeze past a hedge-lined B-road. But he also gives the Redeye its due: this is still one of the last unapologetically analog muscle cars Detroit ever built, and no amount of left-hand-drive comedy changes how good it sounds doing it.

⚑ Featured Gear

Start Car Conversations →

As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

Why the Redeye Matters

The Hellcat Redeye arrived for the 2019 model year as Dodge’s answer to a simple problem: the standard 707-hp Hellcat wasn’t enough anymore. Engineers borrowed the larger 2.7-liter supercharger from the range-topping Demon — up from the standard Hellcat’s 2.4-liter unit — bolted on strengthened internals and improved cooling, and came away with 797 horsepower and 707 lb-ft of torque from the supercharged 6.2-liter HEMI V8. Buyers could pair that output with either a six-speed manual or an eight-speed automatic, sending everything to the rear wheels alone. The results were as absurd as the numbers suggest: roughly 3.4 seconds to 60 mph and a quarter-mile in the low-11-second range for standard cars, dropping into the 10-second range for the widebody version, with a top speed north of 200 mph.

It’s a very different kind of Mopar rarity than the one we covered in our deep dive on Dodge’s cut-rate Hemi-fighter from 1969. Where that car proved you didn’t need the biggest engine to make a statement, the Redeye proves the opposite: sometimes the entire point is building the biggest engine anyone will sell you.

The End of an Era

The Redeye also marked the beginning of the end. Dodge built it all the way through the Challenger’s final model year in 2023, right alongside the even more unhinged Demon 170, before retiring the platform in favor of the electric Charger Daytona. That makes every Redeye — factory left-hand-drive, oddball UK import, or otherwise — a rolling piece of the last chapter in Detroit’s naturally aspirated, supercharged muscle car story. Buyers in markets that never got the car officially, like the UK, are increasingly turning to independent importers like AMS Dodge just to get their hands on what may be the last of its kind.

What Makes It Special

Numbers alone don’t explain why the Redeye holds up as one of the great modern muscle cars. It’s the way the supercharger note builds from an idle rumble to a shriek, the way the car refuses to be subtle about what it is, and the way it still rewards a driver willing to work a clutch pedal instead of just mashing a paddle. Import it into a country that never officially asked for it, hand it to a reviewer more used to hatchbacks and SUVs, and you get exactly the kind of culture-clash content that reminds American muscle car fans why this platform earned such diehard loyalty in the first place.

Watch the full video above and let us know your thoughts in the comments.